Dr Timothy Chisholm works in the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge and is the Henslow Fellow at St Edmund’s College, Cambridge. Tim also completed his PhD at the Department, in the Hunter Group, and before joining St Edmund’s, he was a member of Trinity College.
Tim research aims to develop diagnostic methods for neurodegenerative diseases, and for Parkinson’s disease in particular. Ten million people are estimated to have Parkinson’s disease worldwide, with one million new cases being diagnosed each year. However, diagnosing Parkinson’s can be very challenging. One in four patients are initially misdiagnosed, and this initial diagnosis can take months to years.
Parkinson’s and other neurodegenerative diseases are characterised by protein aggregates; clumps of misfolded protein that appear in the brain. Tim’s PhD research focused on finding new molecules that cling to these aggregates, and on developing a better understanding as to how these molecules interact with aggregates. As a Henslow Fellow Timothy is expanding on this work to study several different aspects of neurodegenerative diseases. The ultimate goal of this research is to develop a diagnostic test that can identify Parkinson’s disease both earlier and more accurately.
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The fundamental laws of physics look different when reflected in a mirror. This is the statement that the laws of physics have a handedness, what physicists call chirality. This is one of the most important facts that we know about the universe, a fact that, remarkably, goes a long way to fixing the mathematical structure of the laws of nature. I will explain how we know about this handedness, why it’s so important, and why there are still several chiral mysteries that remain unsolved.
Dementia is a topic of considerable public interest. How empirical evidence has contributed to this societal awareness and indeed fear will be covered in this talk. It will span research from the 1980s when not much was understood about dementia up to contemporary perspectives. The focus will be on the epidemiological and public health evidence base, and how this relates to the results published from clinical and lab based research. The findings from UK and other high income countries of reduced age specific prevalence (%) will be explored, and the implications of results from brain based studies that dementia is not inevitable in the presence of ‘alzheimer’ type changes. The role of inequalities, risk varying across countries and time and our knowledge about protective factors have strengthened during recent years, and the balance of high risk with whole population approaches to reducing risk for society will be considered.
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